


Retractions

by KlayterMcCabe



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Slash Goggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-04-13
Packaged: 2017-12-08 02:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KlayterMcCabe/pseuds/KlayterMcCabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chase and Cameron's relationship is all about House. If they were other people, they would probably be handling it better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Rest of the Disciples

The first time he should have walked away from Cameron was the first time they had sex, as soon as these words left her lips:

"Come on, Chase—don't turn into a good guy on me now."

He was not deliberately a villain; in fact Chase preferred to think of himself as an island, letting no one swim to shore.

But for Cameron apathy was a sin as great as any other, and he should have walked away instead of stepping inside her apartment and taking off his pants.

He did not want the drama of being someone's bad guy, did not want to carry all the weight of the poor decision they were about to make.

(He did not know yet that it would be impossible to carry more weight than Cameron—more guilt, or more responsibility, or more hope, or more fury, or more despair.)

Cameron that night was a different creature from the Cameron of Princeton-Plainsboro. She was red-eyed, she fisted her hands in his hair with manic energy. She was sad and crazy with whatever had inspired her to try meth in the first place.

They had frenetic, inspiring sex, and Chase had better sense than to expect an afterglow.

"You should go," Cameron said, as soon as they finished. One of her hands was still dancing in the bed sheets, something she did not seem to notice.

"Are you sure you're going to be alright?" he asked, picking up his boxers off the floor.

Cameron snorted. "Do I look alright?" she asked.

The answer was no, but Chase knew that wasn't the word she was looking for.

"You look fine," he said.

"I _am_ fine," Cameron snapped. She went into the bathroom while Chase finished dressing, and he heard the shower running. He looked around the room to make sure he hadn't left anything behind, then ducked into the kitchen and filled two glasses with water. He drained one, and set the other on the nightstand next to Cameron's bed. He reached into his messenger bag and took out a bottle of aspirin, shook out three, and left them next to the glass of water. Then he went home.

 

000

Chase was late the morning after House hit him in the face.

"Oh," said Cameron, the syllable more a mewl than a word, when she saw the bruise on his face. "What happened?"

"You call another mobster a fag?" Foreman asked, smiling.

"Nothing happened," said Chase. If he was angry about it yesterday, then today he was mostly embarrassed. This was not his fault, but he still felt vaguely ashamed. It was not an unfamiliar pattern.

"Seriously," said Cameron. "What happened?"

" _Seriously_ ," Chase mocked, his American accent unconvincing, "nothing happened."

"Oh-ho," said Foreman, grinning even more widely. "You back with that girl? What's her name? The one who liked to be burned? "

Cameron's eyes went wide. She looked away from him.

"No," said Chase. "I am not. And I was never in that to begin with. That was all...her."

"So you got into a fight," guessed Foreman. "Hitting on someone else's girlfriend."

"No," said Chase.

"A _girl_ hit you," guessed Cameron, her voice lightly teasing. "For being too fresh."

Chase lifted his chin. Enough people in the hospital had seen that the gossip would get around. It was somewhat surprising Cameron and Foreman didn't already know.

"House hit me," he said. The other two were silent. "You saw him yesterday," Chase added. "He was detoxing. I told him my porphyria theory. We argued about it. Anyway, I won the argument." He did not explain that he won the argument from the floor.

"Well," said Foreman slowly. "That's a new House low, isn't it?"

Cameron didn't say anything at all.

When House came in later, tossing his file at Chase, the other two watched House, not him.

When House asked him if he'd had the bruise looked at, he said no, but the words that he wanted to say, that surprised him with their fervency, were: as if a weak old junkie like you could do any damage.

 

000

Cameron cornered him while the bruise was still fresh. Chase was in the cafeteria, shredding pieces of iceberg lettuce from a mostly inedible salad.

"Did you deserve it?" she asked, standing over him. Chase blinked up at her. He was surprised and only mildly offended, but more than either of those things amused at her choice of wording. He waited for her to catch herself.

"That's not what I meant," she added quickly. "I mean, did you provoke him? House didn't just hit you." She stared at Chase's salad, which freed him to look at her face.

"He was walking away," said Chase. "I didn't even push him, really. I was just trying to keep him from walking away."

"But you did push him," Cameron repeated. For a moment, Chase wanted to repeat the phrase he had just used: _I didn't even push him._ But Cameron was wearing an expression as close as he'd ever seen to the night they had sex: there was something desperate in her, something in her eyes that said the world had been turned upside down. Chase had the power to give her something she could use to reorient.

"Yes," he said. "I pushed him first."

Cameron looked into his eyes a few seconds longer. Chase didn't know what she was hoping to find there, but doubted she would.

"Okay," she said. "I'm glad you did it, though. You saved that little girl."

Chase was shocked at how good it felt to hear someone tell him that he'd done the right thing.

 

000

Foreman came as close as anyone else did to expressing sympathy or concern.

"You know," he said in the lab, "if House had hit me, I'd have hit him right back."

Chase didn't look up from preparing his slide. "You'd have hit a cripple going through withdrawal?"

"I'd have hit _House._ "

"Well," said Chase lightly, "lucky for him he hit me, then."

Foreman looked up from his microscope. "No luck about it," he said. "House wouldn't have hit me in the first place."

They did not discuss the matter again.

 

000

The second time he should have walked away from Cameron was the second time she wanted to sleep with him.

Chase never had trouble finding people to sleep with him. He might have had a certain predilection for women who could politely be called "troubled," but that was never a barrier to getting laid.

Cameron's difficulties forming an NSA sexual arrangement were not his own.

He was better than microwave pizza.

None of that stopped Chase from smiling when he followed her into the snow and said "yes."


	2. Kill This Thing Before it Grows

The night they learned House was not going to die—that he was never actually sick—Cameron and Chase got blitzed. It had been years since Cameron was so drunk she couldn't get up off the floor; it had been less long for Chase.

"I just can't believe he'd do that," Cameron slurred again. "That he'd be so cruel to us." Her hair spread in a halo around her head on the beige carpet.

"You're reading it wrong." Chase sounded less drunk, but wasn't. He had his mother's knack for seeming sober. "It didn't have anything to do with us."

Cameron snorted. "Yeah, he just left all those clues for  _nobody_ to find."

Chase laughed too loudly, his inebriation apparent in those syllables in a way it wasn't when he used words. "They weren't clues, Allison. We went  _looking_." He paused. "Didn't you start it? By opening his mail?"

"I  _always_  open his mail. Otherwise it just gets thrown away."

"...And when we broke into his apartment?"

"I was defending my job," she said. "It would be just like him to leave us without any warning."

"You mean just like him to leave Princeton-Plainsboro."

Cameron was quiet. Chase slumped in his armchair, looking down at her. She lifted one of her legs to rest her ankle on his knees, and he placed two fingers on her medial malleolus.

"You're the one who wanted to have sex in his bed," she snapped. Chase gently stroked up her leg.

"I thought it would turn you on."

Cameron closed her eyes. From this angle the shadow of his chair covered half her face. "It did," she whispered.

Chase wanted to be hurt or angry or offended, but he was merely unsurprised and vaguely guilty. It had turned him on, too.

"I kissed him," Cameron confessed. "Trying to take a blood sample."

Chase withdrew his hand, though she left her leg resting on his own. "This isn't a relationship," he said. "You don't have to tell me things like that."

"He kissed me back," she said. Chase closed his eyes, but this made the world spin, and he felt sick to his stomach. He stood to get a glass of water and her leg thumped down on the carpet. Chase stumbled over her, then caught himself on the edge of the wall and loomed there, balanced just over Cameron's chest.

"I don't want to know," he said. "If you and me are just about him. That's fine, if that's how you want to do this. But don't  _tell me_  about it."

He straightened up, but was too dizzy to make it to the kitchen and back. He slid down the wall until he was crouched on the carpet next to her.

"I'm glad he's not dying," he said slowly. Cameron scooted toward him, and he opened up his posture until she could rest her head on his leg. Even at this distance they could smell the alcohol on each other's breath.

"Me too," Cameron murmured.

"I gave him a hug," Chase said. "The last time I saw my own dad alive all he got was a handshake."

Cameron was quiet. The magnitude of this confession both weighed her down and buoyed her up.

"I thought you hated your father," she said slowly.

"I do."

Her head was still on Chase's lap, but he stared at the wall opposite them, hands loose and resting on the carpet.

"I asked him to have a drink with me, the last time he was in town. He was dying of cancer, and I didn't know it. He said he had a plane to catch." Speaking was exhausting. Chase felt empty.

Cameron sank and floated. In this moment she loved Chase completely, the way she loved martyrs and children and the idea that all people had something fundamentally good buried in their hearts. She reached up and ran a hand along his stubble, tracing the lines of a younger Chase hidden in his grown-up face. He blinked down at her, as if startled to find that she was still there.

"I did worse than you," Chase added, trying to make his voice light. "At least you got some tongue. When I hugged him he just held perfectly still and made smartass remarks." He laughed suddenly. "If I hugged him and you kissed him, Foreman must have tried sucking cock."

Cameron smiled and shook her head. "He just tried to talk him into a treatment plan."

They were quiet, but this registered in Cameron's brain, though her sober self would not think of it again for months: she went to trick House, and Foreman went to convince him, but Chase went with empty hands. It was like something from a children's book, as if love alone could cure the sick.

In some awkward, unspeakable way, she was jealous.

Cameron wrapped her arms around Chase's neck and pulled herself into a sitting position in his lap. She kissed him quickly, then ran her tongue along his bottom lip. Chase took a long few heartbeats to respond.

"I think," he said quietly, "I might be too drunk."

Cameron pressed her body against his, looking for an answering erection.

"I mean," Chase said, "if I move too much, I think I'll vomit."

Cameron scuttled off his lap so fast it should have been comical, except that she felt nauseated, too. She leaned against the wall next to him. They held this tableau for what felt like a long time, both of them drunk and tired and angry and melancholy.

"Well," she said, to take his mind off it, "for an Australian, you sure can't hold your liquor."

She looked over at him, waiting for an indignant response, but Chase's eyes were closed, and his breathing steady.

"Chase?" she asked.

He was dead to the world. Cameron used the table to drag herself to her feet, then steadied herself against the wall to make it into the kitchen. She filled two glasses with tap water, spilling remarkably little of it on the carpet, and fumbled with a bottle of aspirin from the cupboard. She took a few sips of water, then chased down one of the pills with the rest of the glass. She set the other glass and a couple of pills on the table near Chase, and covered him with a throw blanket from the couch. His blond hair covered his closed eyes, and for a moment he could have been anyone passed out in her living room—then she blinked and he coalesced into himself again. Looking at him, she knew that a terrible seed had been planted, that Chase was someone with hurts as deep as anyone else's, and that if she did not kill this thing, it would grow.

In a little less than a month, she would dump him.

At the time, it would not feel like a mistake.


End file.
